Walker, Mike

ORAL HISTORY OF MICHAEL WALKER
Interviewed by Amy Fitzgerald, Ph.D.
Filmed by Donny Ridenour for Secret City Films
October 28, 2010
Dr. Fitzgerald: This is Amy Fitzgerald and I’m here today with Mike Walker, former Assistant City Manager and Research and Budget Director for the City of Oak Ridge. Mike is here today to do an interview for the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History project. In particular, related to the birth of the city, which is the part of the project that we are focusing on that really takes a look at the history of the City of Oak Ridge after World War II and its progression in terms of the incorporation of the city and the establishment of the institutions, the schools, the government, the civic organizations that really made Oak Ridge what it is today. As a city official, you played a very important role in the development of the City of Oak Ridge after the period during which a lot of people weren’t sure there was actually going to be a city here. So we’re going to start the interview and Mike, if you would, tell us a little bit about your background, where were you raised and what brought you to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Walker: I was born in North Carolina, Brevard, North Carolina and grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina and went to college at High Point University. After college I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I had a professor at the time and he suggested maybe Public Administration might be an option. So I applied at several schools and was accepted and University of Tennessee provided me a fellowship, which paid my tuition and four hundred dollars a month tax-free. So I thought orange was really a pretty color and came to graduate school and graduated 1977. Two weeks later there was actually an opening for a Budget Officer. That was sort of an entry staff position here at the City of Oak Ridge that prepared the budget. I interviewed along with other people in my class who were graduating at the same time and was very fortunate. Was hired by Lyle Lacey, former City Manager and at that time was the Assistant Manager, and was in that position for about three years. Actually I think I had some promotions in there, but after about three years I was hired to work at the City of Knoxville and was the Deputy Budget Director there for three years. That was during the World’s Fair. As y’all remember, lots of folks remember Knoxville was broke at the time but was having the World’s Fair and was having to deliver services for sixty thousand people there every day and didn’t have any money in the bank so to speak. So it was a very creative time. Learned a lot about how to do things with not a lot of resources. But after three years I’d had all the fun I needed and seen all the ways you could make things work and was hired back over here at Oak Ridge. Came here in late ’83 as Research and Budget Director. I was over the preparations budget again, as well as – at that time, they called it data processing, but it was a technology area and several other functions, community development block grant. The city qualified for that and I was over that program as well. I was the liaison to the Environmental Quality Advisory Board at the time that all the revelations came out about the pollution and contamination with the community of Oak Ridge became public. So it was a very challenging time with that subject, as everybody knows. In 1986, Lyle Lacey – as well as Joe King who was the Assistant Manager – both left within about a month and I was appointed the interim City Manager and served in that role for about four months. After that a new manager came in, Jeff Broughton, and I was appointed by Jeff to be the Assistant Manager and was given responsibility over what I call the development activities: Planning and Zoning, Codes Enforcement, Engineering, the Economic Development Program at the time. We actually built an industrial park. So I got a lot of experience with dealing with development, and at that time there was development going on in the late ’80s, and served in that role until May of 1990. I was hired by the City of Brentwood to be City Manager. At the time, Brentwood was about sixteen thousand people. They were looking for a person who had a strong financial background, as well as could deal with developers because they were in a location where there was a lot of development happening and continued to happen over the next 20 years. So I’ve been the city manager there since 1990 and currently in that role.
Dr. Fitzgerald: If you think back to right after graduating from graduate school and being a young professional, what were your first impressions of Oak Ridge as a city when you arrived? If you had any spare time, what types of activities did you engaged in your free time? What was the city like? The community?
Mr. Walker: Well, at the time, Oak Ridge still had a military look. There was lots of open land. I notice riding in today a lot of it’s pretty much built out here in the center of the city, but there was some major vacant land in the center of the city that was controlled by the owner of the shopping center, Mr. Glazer. But there were still a lot of barracks along the Turnpike. So it sort of had that military look, but it was changing at that point. When I was here, I moved here in 1984 when I became a department head and lived on the west end of town in a couple different subdivisions. I started out in – I was trying to remember the name and actually rode by. It’s Greenview. It was a condominium development, but I had a patio home down there and my daughter was very young when we moved here. Toward the end of the ’80s, we built a house in a new development at that time was called Westwood, which is up on Whippoorwill Drive, I believe, at the end of it. So lived there about two or three years before I went to Oak Ridge. So I was involved with stuff that related to my children. Both my children, Laura and Evan, were baptized at St. Mary’s. I think Evan served as – he was Baby Jesus one year. I still remember that. Then I was involved in the Rotary Club. I can’t remember now. I’m in the Rotary Club in Brentwood and we call it the Noon Club. It was the Noon Club here and they had a breakfast club I believe, too, when I was in the Noon Club.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Do you remember where they met?
Mr. Walker: Oh gosh.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Some of the gathering places.
Mr. Walker: Honestly, I’m trying to think. There was a hotel. I believe we met in a hotel somewhere around here. I just can’t remember exactly where it is. I’m sorry. At that time the club had a lot of people who had been in here from day one. I call it ‘day one.’ They were here during the war. So there was really a lot of interesting people here.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, you mentioned in Knoxville the World’s Fair was going on and you moved back here or took a position after the World’s Fair. One of the facilities that was constructed, I guess, during the World’s Fair was – they call it the Energy House over here at the American Museum of Science & Energy. Do you recall any other projects during that period that Oak Ridge was involved in that related to the World’s Fair?
Mr. Walker: I really don’t. We had our hands full in Knoxville just trying to figure out how to keep police on the street at the time. So I didn’t know.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, do you recall going back through and taking a look at some of the pictures, some of your staff that you worked with at the time? You say Lyle Lacey was City Manager initially and then transitioned to Jeff Broughton. Do you have any recollection of some of your other colleagues that you worked with sort of on a day-to-day basis?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, Lyle Lacey was one of my mentors, obviously, as well as David Ammons, who was Assistant Manager. They sort of took me under their wings, so to speak, and worked more of a co-role with Joe King. Joe was never manager here, but was an assistant I think right before he left. Obviously I worked with Jeff and Jeff served as Manager, I believe, four or five years after I left and is still in the state of Tennessee. He’s in Bristol. I worked with – at the time, the Planning Director was Lucien Faust. He had been in that role for probably very early in the creation of the incorporated city. He was the Planning Director. Tim Ward was the Codes Administrator. Steve King was City Engineer. I don’t know if some of these folks are still around or not, but obviously I worked with Penny Sissom. She was the Personnel Director. What do they call it today? HR [Human Resource] directors. And Jackie Bernard who was City Recorder or City Clerk and coordinated the agenda preparations.
Dr. Fitzgerald: How about City Council? At the time, there were twelve City Council members at the time that you worked for the city and we now have seven City Council members. How did you as a manager, department director – how did the staff interact with such a large Council in terms of the work preparation? I know one of the things that was very prominent during that period was having the budget weekends where you would sit down. Is that something that your administration, that you initiated when you were a budget director?
Mr. Walker: The budget review process was pretty much in place when I came. Having a twelve-member Council was really pretty challenging. Each one of them came from a different district, but I think they were elected at-large. That was before we had all the technology today of the e-mails and voicemail systems and all that good stuff that you can communicate easier with. Communication had to be in writing because you want to make sure that whatever information one councilmember received that the others received it as well. So a lot of written documents were prepared. That was before word processing and Microsoft Word and all that good stuff. So there was a lot of that. This city was a very – obviously it’s a very intelligent community. So you always had an expert in almost every subject you had. Actually it was the greatest thing I could ever have from an experience standpoint. I had to learn to anticipate what questions might come up on a subject and be able to prepare and address those and be able to answer them if we had an actual public meeting or a work session or whatever it was. So those were skills that I still use today. Try to anticipate everything. But there was a lot of study, and then we’d have to go back and research more and that kind of stuff. So it was mainly written communication. I think probably a lot of that documentation is still around I assume.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Do you recall some of the major issues facing Oak Ridge during that period?
Mr. Walker: Well, probably the biggest issue, and it was almost every year, was that the contribution from the Department of Energy in lieu of taxes was an annual appropriation by Congress. So it was always up in the air. You didn’t know if you were going to receive it or not and it was about twenty percent of the General Fund revenue. So it was not an insignificant amount. There was always efforts by DOE to eliminate it. They came up with a program. I’m trying to remember exactly when this was. It was probably ’84, ’85, somewhere in that period of time that they decided they were going to give the city ten years of contributions in advance and that would be it. The city would sort of be weaned off of receiving money from the Department of Energy, which is sort of silly to think about given their stature here in the community. But anyway, instead of receiving 2.3 million one year, we received twenty-three million dollars. We actually got the check. Mayor Pruitt after the ceremony handed me the check and I kept thinking should I go to Rio, you know, [laughter] but I thought, nah, I’m too honest. So we put it in the bank, but that presented some challenges because if you have that much money in the bank, you can’t spend it all in one year or you’re going to be in trouble. So I created sort of a multi-year financial management plan. That was just about the time spreadsheets were coming out and looking at how we would manage that money over multiple years so that we had a discipline to that. So I was involved in that. Probably the most radical thing that happened about that same time was the City Council cut the property tax rate and that was always an issue here that the rate was too high. Cut it by over fifty percent. Literally cut the property tax bill by fifty percent and used some of this money to supplement it, but they told the public we’re going to have a referendum on our local sales tax and if it doesn’t pass we’re going to have to go back to the tax rate we had in the past, the higher tax rate. There’d always been this mistrust if we raise taxes they’re not going to cut the property tax. Well literally the tax bills went out and it was cut. So that led to actually a passing of the sales tax, the first sales tax here in Oak Ridge. I think Oak Ridge was probably one of the last cities in the state that adopted a local sales tax. So it was a very strategic move. It helped reduce the tax rate down to something that was a little more in line with communities that have school systems and things like that. Those were probably the two biggest things that happened. We had some projects that were involved at that time. DOE as part of this effort was trying to create – I call them industrial parks, but they were office parks, to bring folks in who did work and locate them here so that we could improve our tax base. So we had a lot of relationships there. So there was a lot of things going on. Land was opened up for new housing developments. I don’t even remember the name. I think it was Rivers Run. Seward Norris had a project out there. So there was a lot of things going on that were needed and exciting at the time.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Going back to probably one of the most significant events in the development of the city, as you’ve indicated, was the ten year plan or the buyout, some people call it, for the twenty-three million dollars and at the same time, it’s my understanding, the counties also received separate payments along this similar timeframe. How is a community or how are the public officials within the community �� how were those decisions made in terms of how to go about using that money? You indicated you set up a multi-year model to take a look at how you would utilize those funds over a period of years, but if you think back can you recall how – did you have a committee or a series of committees? Were City Council members involved? DOE? Do you recall any of how those discussions came about?
Mr. Walker: On how we actually used the money?
Dr. Fitzgerald: Leading up to the decision to do the buyout and then subsequently how to utilize the funding.
Mr. Walker: I never knew exactly how that decision originated. I don’t think it originated here locally. I think it was something that happened out of DOE Washington because it was a surprise when it came to the city and we had not been involved in it. Initially there was some reaction in the city and I’ll say that of the City Council. I think I can say that – do we really want to do this? They really do need to be paying something equivalent to taxes and we always said they weren’t paying enough. So there was always that debate. Do we do this? But there was a feeling that every year we were having to go to Washington to try to make sure the money was in the bank for the appropriation. Just the amount of energy, the amount of effort it took to just do that. I think everybody came to the conclusion that this made sense, even though we were going into some uncharted waters. It made sense to go ahead and take that check. But after that, how did you manage it, I think most of the board, once we were in the budget presentations, obviously bought into the model, so to speak, financial management plan. I think it actually stayed on after I left and maybe even they were able to extend that money beyond the ten years, but it gave them a framework to look at it. Finance is one of my strengths so I was glad to be able to figure out something on that.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well and then you had indicated one of your other roles was to help oversee development. I recall at the time that there was a map developed that they referred to and going back and looking at the research is the ‘self-sufficiency map’ where there were a number of parcels of land that were identified that were currently in DOE’s ownership and it’s sort of understood that the city would receive first right of refusal on those pieces of property if they were deemed excess by DOE. That’s one of the issues I think is kind of long-term and still looking at that as a reference point for how land was transitioned to the city. I think out of the twenty-two or so parcels, maybe about a third of those were transferred eventually. So did you have any involvement with the land identifying those parcels?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, I had a little bit. Obviously they set it up where you didn’t have to pay for the land till you took it down. So you could work and have a developer on board to pick up the land. So we weren’t having to cash flow it. They sold the land at a very, what I think was a very reasonable price. They sold twelve hundred acres out past K-25 for a thousand dollars an acre, which I think comes out to 1.2 million, and we turned around and sold it to Boeing. I don’t think Boeing ever moved forward with that project. It was after I left. In fact, I think there’s a subdivision out there now, maybe. But yeah, we were involved, but Oak Ridge never really had a big developer here. I don’t want to sound derogatory and I don’t mean it that way, but there were a lot of smaller developers who just didn’t have the capital resources. As long as I was here, there was always this fear that the town’s going to shutdown, even thirty years later. It was like, well, they’re going to pull the plug. So people were reluctant to invest. So there was always this sort of cloud hanging over. Will we be here tomorrow kind of deal.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did that dissipate a little bit after the payment was received and the contract signed and you developed a financial plan over the next few years of your tenure?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, I think it did a little bit, but there was just always this – because they actually did shut down K-25.
Dr. Fitzgerald: During your tenure here, didn’t they.
Mr. Walker: And I always remember the main problem was the cost of electricity at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant and having TVA reps come in and say to us, “What can we do to help you as a community? We’re TVA. We’re here to help you.” And Lyle Lacey is saying, “Well why don’t you get your electric rates under control?” We lost this major plant because of the rates, but it was a different section of TVA. It was not in the power production part. The other thing in economic development that I was involved in – and bear with me, it’s been a long time –
Dr. Fitzgerald: You’re doing great, thanks.
Mr. Walker: It’s over twenty to twenty-five years ago, so I’m trying to remember all these things, but at the time we had one shopping center and it was owned by an out-of-city owner who lived in Los Angeles, Guilford Glazer. There was a feeling that our retail area was just not up to what it should be and this property was not being developed and he wasn’t making the effort to develop it. Now, maybe from his standpoint, borrowing money and doing it, it didn’t make sense, but we were starting to have people come in saying they wanted to do a mall, and at that time malls were the cool thing to have. So we were directly involved – this was when Jeff was manager, probably ’86, ’87, ’88, with a potential mall that was going to be out behind the Federal Building. So we were involved in that land deal. So there got to be a mall war there. Also Glazer, now he was going to do a mall. So obviously the town couldn’t support two malls, so is he doing that to try to kill the other mall? But anyway that went on and then I think eventually what happened was is that the folks who were going to do the mall over there, I think it was Crown America, they bought Glazer’s property out and consolidated here. That was probably about the time I was leaving, probably early ’90s, late ’80s. But there had to be something that jumpstarted the system. I know there’s still issues today with what’s going to happen with the property twenty years later, but lots of opportunities were being lost and people – obviously once Pellissippi Parkway was built I think in the early ’70s, ’73, you could be in West Knoxville in ten or fifteen minutes and shop. So there were lots of opportunities that could have been there we lost or at least we perceived we lost. So we thought something had to happen that was outside the norm and that’s what the Council thought obviously as well, but it was some heated discussions on all that during that time.
Dr. Fitzgerald: How about the housing, Mike, in terms of we have about twelve thousand housing units in Oak Ridge today and about half of them are still of the World War II era, the alphabet homes and multi-family dwellings that were built back during the war. During your tenure here in Oak Ridge, was there any discussion of, “We need to take a look at what we do with some of this housing”? Was it still being occupied, utilized? Currently we have a fairly significant percentage of those that are rental units. So what types of folks? Were they folks that worked at the plants or do you recall anything about the housing?
Mr. Walker: Oh yeah. I can recall a lot. There were a lot of units that quite frankly should have been torn down in the ’50s. They were truly temporary housing, but I think there was a protest that you’re just trying to force the lower income people out of town and if you tear these houses down, that’s what’s going to happen. Obviously that’s before I got here, but they sold these houses to the original renters when the government owned them for five hundred dollars, six hundred dollars. I think the letter houses, cemesto houses, they were maybe two thousand dollars or three thousand. But a lot of the – I call it the temporary housing – it was like the little –
Dr. Fitzgerald: Flat tops?
Mr. Walker: Flat tops, yeah. I was trying to think of the word, but twenty-four by twenty-four [feet]. What happened over multiple years of the ’60s and probably into the ’70s was that entrepreneurs, we’ll call them – some people would call them slum lords – bought the houses and rented them out. I was trying to remember the guy’s name now, but had several slum lord types that were doing that. When I was here it was more of a codes issue. You go in and the house doesn’t have screens on it. Do we go after the landlord? The landlord would fix them, but he’d say, “The tenants are tearing up screens. What am I going to do about that?’’ kind of deal. But I remember the one guy, we went after with the – roof shingles needed to be replaced. He went out down to the salvage yard and got top-of-the-line shingles that were there on the yard and brought them back up and put them up, but they didn’t match, the colors. There was like a checkerboard. And I think he was just trying to – you know, the neighbors were complaining, and he was just trying to intimidate the neighbors, you know, the ones who actually were trying to keep up their property, to move out, so to speak. So, you know, the code, the minimum building code doesn’t deal with aesthetics. It deals with the quality of the materials and that kind of thing. So this was the kind of stuff we were dealing with. We had people who were – you’d ride down the street and, you know, the picture window was out at one of those flat tops. It was a plastic screen. I don’t know if this is still the case today, but anyway, they put plastic over it. So I’m with Tim Ward, you know, we walk up and like, “What happened?’’ And, you know, “Oh, Paul got mad and threw the TV out the window.” [laughter] And then you go two houses down and since we ran the electric system, all of a sudden, you know, if you cut the power off, you see an extension cord running from one house to the other and they were running the house off an extension cord. Oak Ridge is in a location – gosh, I’m probably going to get killed by what I say here [laughter] – I ought to stop – but Oak Ridge is in a location where it was kind of the health center and may still be today. If you draw a swath up into the mountains northwest of here, this is where they went to the doctors and all that.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Yeah, Regional Medical Center.
Mr. Walker: Regional Medical. A lot of these folks had worked in coal mines I guess and had black lung disease and they couldn’t work. So a lot of them were the ones renting these houses. They moved in and they were not as attuned to calling the city to complain about things. So there was some cultural challenges we were having to deal with as well, but it was never a dull moment. When I got to Brentwood, I think we’ve had to condemn one house in twenty years. But that was the reality of leaving all those temporary houses up.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did you see many of the folks that had purchased those maybe originally or who were children of the homeowners who purchased them originally? Did you see many of them? You mentioned River’s Run and the subdivision you built your house in. Do you think many people moved out of those and transitioned into new housing and stayed here? Did you see in terms of the folks who lived in Oak Ridge much movement? At that time, Pellissippi was not developed, but today we also see a lot of folks living in Knoxville and in Farragut that commute into Oak Ridge. I suspect that wasn’t the case to that degree when you were here.
Mr. Walker: Well it was already in full motion.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Was it?
Mr. Walker: I think the challenge was the relative housing prices here, even with the improved cemesto – and the numbers, now, I may have them off – but if it was forty thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars for a house, do you buy a thirty year old house, at that time, you know, or do you buy a house that’s the same price or less that’s brand new and bigger in west Knoxville. That was the real challenge. People were coming in to work here and they didn’t have the history of Oak Ridge when it was a gated community and we had mud on the streets and we had won the war and all those great things. It was just a new generation came in. People move into Westwood. You had some people transferring in from out of town that were moving there, but you had other people who might have lived maybe in a cemesto, moved there or maybe in some of the newer houses that were built in the ’60s, moving up, that kind of thing. That momentum was already there when I got here.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did you see much in the way of population change one way or the other during the time you lived here?
Mr. Walker: Well the town was getting progressively older. When I say that, I don’t mean negative, either. It was just that people had moved in in the ’40s and they were all young or relatively young, and then they just stayed in their houses. The community aged. We were having to deal with, at that time, schools that had closed down and the buildings were there, and you know, what do you do with those buildings, and demolish them. The school system was overbuilt, having to go down, but every community I think eventually evolves through where you come in and age out sort of like that, but that really did affect Oak Ridge’s ability to get – it just didn’t have the normal circulation of new people in. Quite frankly, the geography here is just really challenging. The land’s flatter in Knox County than it is here. There are areas here that we would not even allow to be built on in Brentwood because of the steepness of the slopes, but here it’s normal, because, you know, it’s three narrow valleys that went down. They put the plants in each valley. Strategically they did not want, I guess, the Germans or whoever to be able to find this place and get in and that sort of worked against the community because you didn’t have thousands of acres that were just sitting there flat and for average, DOE never released land until starting in the ’80s, the late ’80s. By that time the momentum really was – had already –
Dr. Fitzgerald: Shifted?
Mr. Walker: Shifted there.
Dr. Fitzgerald: You mentioned the schools in terms of your role as Budget Director and later Assistant City Manager. Would it have been Bob Smallridge? Do you recall who was –
Mr. Walker: Bob Smallridge.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did you in terms of your annual budget preparations have a fair amount of interaction with the schools?
Mr. Walker: Well there was some informal discussions, but having been in a city for the last twenty years where we don’t have a school system – it’s a county school system and is recognized as being a good school system, Williamson County – the schools cost a lot of money. There’s just no question about it, and under the Charter, the city could not change the line item that the schools gave us for the local request. We had to just put it in the budget. So you could have a budget that was balanced if they had only had a reasonable increase, but they increased it higher. Then all of a sudden we’re having to go in with a property tax increase. So the Manager and the Council were the ones taking the heat for the increases and it was very difficult politically to cut schools. If you did it on first reading at the public hearing for the next meeting, they’d have a hundred children in there and how they weren’t going to be able to have any paper and all that good stuff. It was all – I don’t want to say it was staged – but it’s kind of hard to tell the –
“You’re not going to do it for the children?” So, very difficult, and school, I mean, you know, when you’ve got a school system as small as Oak Ridge and I don’t know how many students they have now, but you don’t get a lot of economies of scale. And everybody here expected quality schools; that’s why they moved here. So I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t have a school system, but I remember going to Brentwood and they asked me, the first thing, “Can we get in the school business?’’ So I ran the numbers and I said, “Do you want property tax to be three times what it is right now?” “Oh no.” I said, “That’s exactly what it would take to get into the school business.” At the time, you still could get into it. Now you cannot, under the law, but it’s just very expensive if you run a city school system – so, tradeoffs.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Going back through and taking a look at some of the newspaper clippings that I found from your tenure here, one of the things that struck me was back in 1984 where the city government finance officers association awarded the City of Oak Ridge under your tenure, the first budget award, the first time in Tennessee. There was a quote in there subsequently where you’re talking about the budget weekend where you were quoted as saying, “‘I love budgeting. I can talk numbers and interpret what they mean,’ Walker said, smiling.” So what was that like in terms of for the first time in Tennessee having garnered that award under your tenure?
Mr. Walker: Well I forgot that we were the first city. When I went to Brentwood we received the award about a year or two after I got there, but everybody who’s in a job as a city manager has certain skill sets and my core one was finance and I just knew – I could understand the numbers. I still can do that today. I don’t prepare the budget, but –
Dr. Fitzgerald: You still smile?
Mr. Walker: I still smile. Where I am today we have Triple A bond rating from two rating agencies. We’re financially sound, even when times were good and we had lots of money coming in. We didn’t spend it all. We’re very conservative on how we spent our money. It’s not just what you collect. It’s how you carry it out. A lot of those things I learned here. Here we were struggling. The economy was tough back then and you didn’t have the same kind of growth. So we were having to watch every nickel we spent. So I sort of took that even when times were good in Brentwood. A lot of my younger staff had never been through a recession until the last two years and he just assumed everything just always went up and couldn’t understand why I was so conservative all the time and after last two years they think I’m a genius now. You know how it is. So there’s some benefit of being old I guess.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, and one of the other clippings that I found, which if you recall Knoxville News Sentinel reporter Frank Munger who still reports about Department of Energy issues in Oak Ridge. He did an article in September of 1985 where he named the twenty-five most impressive people in Oak Ridge and I noted in that article that Mike Walker was the only city employee that was named in that top twenty-five list. You talked a little bit about your relationship and the City’s relationship with the Department of Energy, but do you recall any particular folks within DOE who you interacted with in working on some of those city financial issues. Because obviously if you impressed Frank Munger that’s very impressive. [laughter]
Mr. Walker: Well, at the time, it was less on the financial issues and more on the environmental issues. Frank had a reputation of being a really astute reporter and he was. He was a good reporter, but I never had any issues with him, but the problem we had was, and I don’t know if you’ve been told this or not, but DOE – well let me back up. In the early ’80s, like ’81, ’82, when I was in Knoxville, the city built a new sewer plant which is out near Big Turtle Park, and they had to pump all the sewer that was on the east side of town, at gravity, to an old plant out there, back over, and it ran right through the city, the force main, went right through between this building here, the Municipal Center, and the Civic Center. At the time, after it was done, they needed to get the grass growing. Well, top soil had piled up around the bridges down on the East Fork Poplar Creek. So hey, we can do like a – I hate to use the term ��dredging’ now because that’s not socially acceptable anymore to the environmentalists – but we were taking the sediment that had piled up there and taken that and were spreading it on the sewer line all the way through the city. Well, it ended up, that was part of the contaminated material that came out of the creek. At the time, nobody at DOE – and they rode by there every day and had to know there was some issue with the creek, somebody did, and never said anything to the City Government about it – so all of a sudden when all this revelation came about the mercury contamination – and, I mean, it was really complex stuff, way beyond – I’m not a scientist, but I was the staff person dealing with the state environment health as well as DOE. We had to go in – and it was paid for by the feds – but they had to go in and take out basically a foot of dirt all the way through the areas where lots of people would be. We had TV cameras out here from Knoxville filming people in hazmat suits digging up the dirt through Bissell Park basically. So I was dealing a lot on that issue more than finance. So Frank was the reporter who was covering most of that. So I was the city rep; I was the city liaison. So if I knew something, I could answer his question, and I did. If I didn’t know it, I would tell him that. I think that may be why he said – because a lot of times, people don’t, especially in the federal government, don’t talk to folks. I dealt with people like – well I don’t know if they’re still around – Wayne Hibbetts and other folks that were involved, and quite frankly, the contamination problem was so unique that the only people that could figure it out were the people here at Oak Ridge, how to deal with it.
Dr. Fitzgerald: How did that information come to light then, when they had the soil piled up? How did the suspicion that there was something with the soil, how did that come about?
Mr. Walker: They literally had people come out – you know, once we knew what had happened – basically it was mercury spills that had come through the East Fork Poplar Creek. They started doing soil samples and we said “We want you to do them in this area.” Because nobody wanted to put –
Dr. Fitzgerald: DOE did the soil samples?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, one of their contractors did it. So that’s how we found out that we had high – elevated levels of mercury and, you know, it wasn’t that mercury was the direct problem – and I’m not a scientist – but it was sort of the trace for potentially other things that could be in the dirt, too, as well. But we had civilian folks – I mean, people had gardens along the creeks – testing their tomatoes. We had people’s urine being flown to the CDC to be tested to see if they had picked up anything. I learned a lot. The thing that was so good, we had a great Environmental Quality Advisory Board. Chuck Coutant was – I don’t know if Chuck’s still around – but Chuck was just – he was the chairman and there were four or five – well, there’s maybe ten on the board – but a lot of them had sort of ORNL background. They may not have been experts at all. They knew how to ask the questions. I didn’t know all this stuff. So what gives you confidence is they’re your neighbors. They’re living here and when we talk about this stuff, it’s a problem, but it wasn’t a public health issue. But the perception issue was just a killer. It was a killer. It hurt Oak Ridge for years.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, being in Brentwood now for twenty years distance from your Oak Ridge tenure, what’s your perception today in terms of not living here anymore? Do you have any sense for whether that image has changed of Oak Ridge from outside East Tennessee?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, I think it has. You had that issue and then everybody had this image that everybody there is really smart and the Ph.D.s and all that stuff, so you’ve got – and a good school system. So you get sort of a mixed bag. When I applied for the job in Brentwood, you know, one of the issues and concerns I had was what was the school system like, because I had no – gosh, I was going to be going to a county school. It just so happened a planning commissioner who had been here had moved there a year or two before. I didn’t realize he was there, but he called me up and he said, “Good schools.” He said they may not have all the resources that Oak Ridge had, but they had enough parental involvement that it covered it. So everybody knows about the quality things in Oak Ridge, and lots of leaders in the state came from here.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well now that you’ve been back a few times, what are your observations? What are the biggest things you’ve seen, the changes since you’ve worked and lived here, other than the Pellissippi Parkway?
Mr. Walker: Well I actually have not been on Pellissippi. I normally come up 58 and 95. I’ll probably go out Pellissippi on the way out today to North Carolina. The Downtown area’s substantially built out. What I call Downtown, where we are right here. A lot more traffic, but it’s that way everywhere I guess. It’s all relative. It’s still a beautiful town. It’s a clean town. Great place to raise kids. I didn’t sense anything different on that.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well you have mentioned a few of the lessons that you learned maybe in Oak Ridge that you have applied to your tenure as Brentwood City Manager. Are there other examples that you can think of? Obviously you had quite an experience here basically in what you just described, which sounds like it was good experience for learning how to deal with the media and dealing with a somewhat crisis situation, but as you take a look at the experience that you drew here, do you have any other observations?
Mr. Walker: Well, it was a town that did not make decisions quickly. The process part was as important as the outcome. So one of the shocks was when I went to Brentwood, it was more of a business oriented town, professional oriented. If they had ninety-five percent of the facts on an issue, they were willing to take a calculated risk to move ahead because they didn’t want to lose the opportunity. So that was shocking to me that you didn’t have to get to 99.9 percent of the information before you made a decision. But I still – from an analytical standpoint, there’s not a thing I do there that I don’t think about, “Well, what questions potentially could be asked about the subject?” I mean, I anticipate everything. [laughter]
Dr. Fitzgerald: Thoroughly analyzing all the –
Mr. Walker: I analyze it to death, you know, in my mind, because there will be questions that come up and you just want to be ready. That’s not to say we don’t have scientists there, but that’s just the difference of the culture, I think. There’s a lot more entrepreneurs there, a lot more diversity of the business community.
Dr. Fitzgerald: One of the things that I’ve seen as kind of a trend since my tenure here is looking at the modernization of Y-12 and the phenomenal modernization of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. One of the things they have continued to build upon is looking at the business – the incubator – the Tech 2020 relationship with the Chamber of Commerce – but in looking at how to grow businesses from the technology that comes out of the lab and Y-12, was that ever much of an emphasis while you were here?
Mr. Walker: Not to the degree it probably is today. I’m glad to hear that because we did have a building over on Midway Lane that we would – and then the other industrial park – I can’t remember now – where we would actually –
Dr. Fitzgerald: Commerce Park?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, provide low rent space to entrepreneurs who had ideas that came out of something that they were doing at the Lab. The Lab I think at that time had a lot of, you know, if you figure out something, it’s our – we own it. We own the rights to your patent or whatever you call it. So there was not that kind of environment. I had a close friend who lived here and ended up – he was at the Lab probably eight or ten years and ended up going to UNC Chapel Hill, professor, because he was able to do more things and reap some reward out of it.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Was that David?
Mr. Walker: Gary Glish.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Yes, okay.
Mr. Walker: You know Gary?
Dr. Fitzgerald: Okay, well, it made me think of David Ammons –
Mr. Walker: Yeah, David Ammons is there too, obviously.
Dr. Fitzgerald: – in terms of over there. But as a public administrator, if you were teaching a class about Oak Ridge, are there any other things that you would say to students that you think are significant in terms of public management?
Mr. Walker: Well, everybody here is thorough, they’re honest. Maybe I will say something out of line, but integrity is really important here and doing the right thing; people try to help people. They started out with a model that was created by the Federal Government on how the city should be. Literally there was a book. It’s probably still around. Every department has this number of employees doing this. It was a consultant the feds had in. So, you know, there was a lot more – I hate to use the word ‘bureaucratic’ – but it was a lot more structured.
Dr. Fitzgerald: The original planned development.
Mr. Walker: Yeah, exactly. But Oak Ridge is recognized as a well-run city in the state. It’s always had a good reputation on that end. You got a dedicated staff. We got people here and they were here twenty years before I was here or fifteen years before I was here and they’re still here today. A lot of loyalty.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Is there anything else that you’d like to add that you don’t think we’ve touched on?
Mr. Walker: Well I just appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak today. I think this is a good program. I just saw a piece of everything. There are other people who saw as much or more than I did, but it’s a very unique town. There are very few like it. Very few towns have one, at that time, one main industry and they were non-taxable. Think about all the things that were so unique about this place, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak, too.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well obviously you played a significant role, as I mentioned at the beginning of the interview. We want to thank you so much for taking your time out to be part of our project and we look forward to a long tenure in the future.
Mr. Walker: Thank you.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Thank you, Mike.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MICHAEL WALKER
Interviewed by Amy Fitzgerald, Ph.D.
Filmed by Donny Ridenour for Secret City Films
October 28, 2010
Dr. Fitzgerald: This is Amy Fitzgerald and I’m here today with Mike Walker, former Assistant City Manager and Research and Budget Director for the City of Oak Ridge. Mike is here today to do an interview for the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History project. In particular, related to the birth of the city, which is the part of the project that we are focusing on that really takes a look at the history of the City of Oak Ridge after World War II and its progression in terms of the incorporation of the city and the establishment of the institutions, the schools, the government, the civic organizations that really made Oak Ridge what it is today. As a city official, you played a very important role in the development of the City of Oak Ridge after the period during which a lot of people weren’t sure there was actually going to be a city here. So we’re going to start the interview and Mike, if you would, tell us a little bit about your background, where were you raised and what brought you to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Walker: I was born in North Carolina, Brevard, North Carolina and grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina and went to college at High Point University. After college I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I had a professor at the time and he suggested maybe Public Administration might be an option. So I applied at several schools and was accepted and University of Tennessee provided me a fellowship, which paid my tuition and four hundred dollars a month tax-free. So I thought orange was really a pretty color and came to graduate school and graduated 1977. Two weeks later there was actually an opening for a Budget Officer. That was sort of an entry staff position here at the City of Oak Ridge that prepared the budget. I interviewed along with other people in my class who were graduating at the same time and was very fortunate. Was hired by Lyle Lacey, former City Manager and at that time was the Assistant Manager, and was in that position for about three years. Actually I think I had some promotions in there, but after about three years I was hired to work at the City of Knoxville and was the Deputy Budget Director there for three years. That was during the World’s Fair. As y’all remember, lots of folks remember Knoxville was broke at the time but was having the World’s Fair and was having to deliver services for sixty thousand people there every day and didn’t have any money in the bank so to speak. So it was a very creative time. Learned a lot about how to do things with not a lot of resources. But after three years I’d had all the fun I needed and seen all the ways you could make things work and was hired back over here at Oak Ridge. Came here in late ’83 as Research and Budget Director. I was over the preparations budget again, as well as – at that time, they called it data processing, but it was a technology area and several other functions, community development block grant. The city qualified for that and I was over that program as well. I was the liaison to the Environmental Quality Advisory Board at the time that all the revelations came out about the pollution and contamination with the community of Oak Ridge became public. So it was a very challenging time with that subject, as everybody knows. In 1986, Lyle Lacey – as well as Joe King who was the Assistant Manager – both left within about a month and I was appointed the interim City Manager and served in that role for about four months. After that a new manager came in, Jeff Broughton, and I was appointed by Jeff to be the Assistant Manager and was given responsibility over what I call the development activities: Planning and Zoning, Codes Enforcement, Engineering, the Economic Development Program at the time. We actually built an industrial park. So I got a lot of experience with dealing with development, and at that time there was development going on in the late ’80s, and served in that role until May of 1990. I was hired by the City of Brentwood to be City Manager. At the time, Brentwood was about sixteen thousand people. They were looking for a person who had a strong financial background, as well as could deal with developers because they were in a location where there was a lot of development happening and continued to happen over the next 20 years. So I’ve been the city manager there since 1990 and currently in that role.
Dr. Fitzgerald: If you think back to right after graduating from graduate school and being a young professional, what were your first impressions of Oak Ridge as a city when you arrived? If you had any spare time, what types of activities did you engaged in your free time? What was the city like? The community?
Mr. Walker: Well, at the time, Oak Ridge still had a military look. There was lots of open land. I notice riding in today a lot of it’s pretty much built out here in the center of the city, but there was some major vacant land in the center of the city that was controlled by the owner of the shopping center, Mr. Glazer. But there were still a lot of barracks along the Turnpike. So it sort of had that military look, but it was changing at that point. When I was here, I moved here in 1984 when I became a department head and lived on the west end of town in a couple different subdivisions. I started out in – I was trying to remember the name and actually rode by. It’s Greenview. It was a condominium development, but I had a patio home down there and my daughter was very young when we moved here. Toward the end of the ’80s, we built a house in a new development at that time was called Westwood, which is up on Whippoorwill Drive, I believe, at the end of it. So lived there about two or three years before I went to Oak Ridge. So I was involved with stuff that related to my children. Both my children, Laura and Evan, were baptized at St. Mary’s. I think Evan served as – he was Baby Jesus one year. I still remember that. Then I was involved in the Rotary Club. I can’t remember now. I’m in the Rotary Club in Brentwood and we call it the Noon Club. It was the Noon Club here and they had a breakfast club I believe, too, when I was in the Noon Club.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Do you remember where they met?
Mr. Walker: Oh gosh.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Some of the gathering places.
Mr. Walker: Honestly, I’m trying to think. There was a hotel. I believe we met in a hotel somewhere around here. I just can’t remember exactly where it is. I’m sorry. At that time the club had a lot of people who had been in here from day one. I call it ‘day one.’ They were here during the war. So there was really a lot of interesting people here.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, you mentioned in Knoxville the World’s Fair was going on and you moved back here or took a position after the World’s Fair. One of the facilities that was constructed, I guess, during the World’s Fair was – they call it the Energy House over here at the American Museum of Science & Energy. Do you recall any other projects during that period that Oak Ridge was involved in that related to the World’s Fair?
Mr. Walker: I really don’t. We had our hands full in Knoxville just trying to figure out how to keep police on the street at the time. So I didn’t know.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, do you recall going back through and taking a look at some of the pictures, some of your staff that you worked with at the time? You say Lyle Lacey was City Manager initially and then transitioned to Jeff Broughton. Do you have any recollection of some of your other colleagues that you worked with sort of on a day-to-day basis?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, Lyle Lacey was one of my mentors, obviously, as well as David Ammons, who was Assistant Manager. They sort of took me under their wings, so to speak, and worked more of a co-role with Joe King. Joe was never manager here, but was an assistant I think right before he left. Obviously I worked with Jeff and Jeff served as Manager, I believe, four or five years after I left and is still in the state of Tennessee. He’s in Bristol. I worked with – at the time, the Planning Director was Lucien Faust. He had been in that role for probably very early in the creation of the incorporated city. He was the Planning Director. Tim Ward was the Codes Administrator. Steve King was City Engineer. I don’t know if some of these folks are still around or not, but obviously I worked with Penny Sissom. She was the Personnel Director. What do they call it today? HR [Human Resource] directors. And Jackie Bernard who was City Recorder or City Clerk and coordinated the agenda preparations.
Dr. Fitzgerald: How about City Council? At the time, there were twelve City Council members at the time that you worked for the city and we now have seven City Council members. How did you as a manager, department director – how did the staff interact with such a large Council in terms of the work preparation? I know one of the things that was very prominent during that period was having the budget weekends where you would sit down. Is that something that your administration, that you initiated when you were a budget director?
Mr. Walker: The budget review process was pretty much in place when I came. Having a twelve-member Council was really pretty challenging. Each one of them came from a different district, but I think they were elected at-large. That was before we had all the technology today of the e-mails and voicemail systems and all that good stuff that you can communicate easier with. Communication had to be in writing because you want to make sure that whatever information one councilmember received that the others received it as well. So a lot of written documents were prepared. That was before word processing and Microsoft Word and all that good stuff. So there was a lot of that. This city was a very – obviously it’s a very intelligent community. So you always had an expert in almost every subject you had. Actually it was the greatest thing I could ever have from an experience standpoint. I had to learn to anticipate what questions might come up on a subject and be able to prepare and address those and be able to answer them if we had an actual public meeting or a work session or whatever it was. So those were skills that I still use today. Try to anticipate everything. But there was a lot of study, and then we’d have to go back and research more and that kind of stuff. So it was mainly written communication. I think probably a lot of that documentation is still around I assume.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Do you recall some of the major issues facing Oak Ridge during that period?
Mr. Walker: Well, probably the biggest issue, and it was almost every year, was that the contribution from the Department of Energy in lieu of taxes was an annual appropriation by Congress. So it was always up in the air. You didn’t know if you were going to receive it or not and it was about twenty percent of the General Fund revenue. So it was not an insignificant amount. There was always efforts by DOE to eliminate it. They came up with a program. I’m trying to remember exactly when this was. It was probably ’84, ’85, somewhere in that period of time that they decided they were going to give the city ten years of contributions in advance and that would be it. The city would sort of be weaned off of receiving money from the Department of Energy, which is sort of silly to think about given their stature here in the community. But anyway, instead of receiving 2.3 million one year, we received twenty-three million dollars. We actually got the check. Mayor Pruitt after the ceremony handed me the check and I kept thinking should I go to Rio, you know, [laughter] but I thought, nah, I’m too honest. So we put it in the bank, but that presented some challenges because if you have that much money in the bank, you can’t spend it all in one year or you’re going to be in trouble. So I created sort of a multi-year financial management plan. That was just about the time spreadsheets were coming out and looking at how we would manage that money over multiple years so that we had a discipline to that. So I was involved in that. Probably the most radical thing that happened about that same time was the City Council cut the property tax rate and that was always an issue here that the rate was too high. Cut it by over fifty percent. Literally cut the property tax bill by fifty percent and used some of this money to supplement it, but they told the public we’re going to have a referendum on our local sales tax and if it doesn’t pass we’re going to have to go back to the tax rate we had in the past, the higher tax rate. There’d always been this mistrust if we raise taxes they’re not going to cut the property tax. Well literally the tax bills went out and it was cut. So that led to actually a passing of the sales tax, the first sales tax here in Oak Ridge. I think Oak Ridge was probably one of the last cities in the state that adopted a local sales tax. So it was a very strategic move. It helped reduce the tax rate down to something that was a little more in line with communities that have school systems and things like that. Those were probably the two biggest things that happened. We had some projects that were involved at that time. DOE as part of this effort was trying to create – I call them industrial parks, but they were office parks, to bring folks in who did work and locate them here so that we could improve our tax base. So we had a lot of relationships there. So there was a lot of things going on. Land was opened up for new housing developments. I don’t even remember the name. I think it was Rivers Run. Seward Norris had a project out there. So there was a lot of things going on that were needed and exciting at the time.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Going back to probably one of the most significant events in the development of the city, as you’ve indicated, was the ten year plan or the buyout, some people call it, for the twenty-three million dollars and at the same time, it’s my understanding, the counties also received separate payments along this similar timeframe. How is a community or how are the public officials within the community �� how were those decisions made in terms of how to go about using that money? You indicated you set up a multi-year model to take a look at how you would utilize those funds over a period of years, but if you think back can you recall how – did you have a committee or a series of committees? Were City Council members involved? DOE? Do you recall any of how those discussions came about?
Mr. Walker: On how we actually used the money?
Dr. Fitzgerald: Leading up to the decision to do the buyout and then subsequently how to utilize the funding.
Mr. Walker: I never knew exactly how that decision originated. I don’t think it originated here locally. I think it was something that happened out of DOE Washington because it was a surprise when it came to the city and we had not been involved in it. Initially there was some reaction in the city and I’ll say that of the City Council. I think I can say that – do we really want to do this? They really do need to be paying something equivalent to taxes and we always said they weren’t paying enough. So there was always that debate. Do we do this? But there was a feeling that every year we were having to go to Washington to try to make sure the money was in the bank for the appropriation. Just the amount of energy, the amount of effort it took to just do that. I think everybody came to the conclusion that this made sense, even though we were going into some uncharted waters. It made sense to go ahead and take that check. But after that, how did you manage it, I think most of the board, once we were in the budget presentations, obviously bought into the model, so to speak, financial management plan. I think it actually stayed on after I left and maybe even they were able to extend that money beyond the ten years, but it gave them a framework to look at it. Finance is one of my strengths so I was glad to be able to figure out something on that.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well and then you had indicated one of your other roles was to help oversee development. I recall at the time that there was a map developed that they referred to and going back and looking at the research is the ‘self-sufficiency map’ where there were a number of parcels of land that were identified that were currently in DOE’s ownership and it’s sort of understood that the city would receive first right of refusal on those pieces of property if they were deemed excess by DOE. That’s one of the issues I think is kind of long-term and still looking at that as a reference point for how land was transitioned to the city. I think out of the twenty-two or so parcels, maybe about a third of those were transferred eventually. So did you have any involvement with the land identifying those parcels?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, I had a little bit. Obviously they set it up where you didn’t have to pay for the land till you took it down. So you could work and have a developer on board to pick up the land. So we weren’t having to cash flow it. They sold the land at a very, what I think was a very reasonable price. They sold twelve hundred acres out past K-25 for a thousand dollars an acre, which I think comes out to 1.2 million, and we turned around and sold it to Boeing. I don’t think Boeing ever moved forward with that project. It was after I left. In fact, I think there’s a subdivision out there now, maybe. But yeah, we were involved, but Oak Ridge never really had a big developer here. I don’t want to sound derogatory and I don’t mean it that way, but there were a lot of smaller developers who just didn’t have the capital resources. As long as I was here, there was always this fear that the town’s going to shutdown, even thirty years later. It was like, well, they’re going to pull the plug. So people were reluctant to invest. So there was always this sort of cloud hanging over. Will we be here tomorrow kind of deal.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did that dissipate a little bit after the payment was received and the contract signed and you developed a financial plan over the next few years of your tenure?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, I think it did a little bit, but there was just always this – because they actually did shut down K-25.
Dr. Fitzgerald: During your tenure here, didn’t they.
Mr. Walker: And I always remember the main problem was the cost of electricity at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant and having TVA reps come in and say to us, “What can we do to help you as a community? We’re TVA. We’re here to help you.” And Lyle Lacey is saying, “Well why don’t you get your electric rates under control?” We lost this major plant because of the rates, but it was a different section of TVA. It was not in the power production part. The other thing in economic development that I was involved in – and bear with me, it’s been a long time –
Dr. Fitzgerald: You’re doing great, thanks.
Mr. Walker: It’s over twenty to twenty-five years ago, so I’m trying to remember all these things, but at the time we had one shopping center and it was owned by an out-of-city owner who lived in Los Angeles, Guilford Glazer. There was a feeling that our retail area was just not up to what it should be and this property was not being developed and he wasn’t making the effort to develop it. Now, maybe from his standpoint, borrowing money and doing it, it didn’t make sense, but we were starting to have people come in saying they wanted to do a mall, and at that time malls were the cool thing to have. So we were directly involved – this was when Jeff was manager, probably ’86, ’87, ’88, with a potential mall that was going to be out behind the Federal Building. So we were involved in that land deal. So there got to be a mall war there. Also Glazer, now he was going to do a mall. So obviously the town couldn’t support two malls, so is he doing that to try to kill the other mall? But anyway that went on and then I think eventually what happened was is that the folks who were going to do the mall over there, I think it was Crown America, they bought Glazer’s property out and consolidated here. That was probably about the time I was leaving, probably early ’90s, late ’80s. But there had to be something that jumpstarted the system. I know there’s still issues today with what’s going to happen with the property twenty years later, but lots of opportunities were being lost and people – obviously once Pellissippi Parkway was built I think in the early ’70s, ’73, you could be in West Knoxville in ten or fifteen minutes and shop. So there were lots of opportunities that could have been there we lost or at least we perceived we lost. So we thought something had to happen that was outside the norm and that’s what the Council thought obviously as well, but it was some heated discussions on all that during that time.
Dr. Fitzgerald: How about the housing, Mike, in terms of we have about twelve thousand housing units in Oak Ridge today and about half of them are still of the World War II era, the alphabet homes and multi-family dwellings that were built back during the war. During your tenure here in Oak Ridge, was there any discussion of, “We need to take a look at what we do with some of this housing”? Was it still being occupied, utilized? Currently we have a fairly significant percentage of those that are rental units. So what types of folks? Were they folks that worked at the plants or do you recall anything about the housing?
Mr. Walker: Oh yeah. I can recall a lot. There were a lot of units that quite frankly should have been torn down in the ’50s. They were truly temporary housing, but I think there was a protest that you’re just trying to force the lower income people out of town and if you tear these houses down, that’s what’s going to happen. Obviously that’s before I got here, but they sold these houses to the original renters when the government owned them for five hundred dollars, six hundred dollars. I think the letter houses, cemesto houses, they were maybe two thousand dollars or three thousand. But a lot of the – I call it the temporary housing – it was like the little –
Dr. Fitzgerald: Flat tops?
Mr. Walker: Flat tops, yeah. I was trying to think of the word, but twenty-four by twenty-four [feet]. What happened over multiple years of the ’60s and probably into the ’70s was that entrepreneurs, we’ll call them – some people would call them slum lords – bought the houses and rented them out. I was trying to remember the guy’s name now, but had several slum lord types that were doing that. When I was here it was more of a codes issue. You go in and the house doesn’t have screens on it. Do we go after the landlord? The landlord would fix them, but he’d say, “The tenants are tearing up screens. What am I going to do about that?’’ kind of deal. But I remember the one guy, we went after with the – roof shingles needed to be replaced. He went out down to the salvage yard and got top-of-the-line shingles that were there on the yard and brought them back up and put them up, but they didn’t match, the colors. There was like a checkerboard. And I think he was just trying to – you know, the neighbors were complaining, and he was just trying to intimidate the neighbors, you know, the ones who actually were trying to keep up their property, to move out, so to speak. So, you know, the code, the minimum building code doesn’t deal with aesthetics. It deals with the quality of the materials and that kind of thing. So this was the kind of stuff we were dealing with. We had people who were – you’d ride down the street and, you know, the picture window was out at one of those flat tops. It was a plastic screen. I don’t know if this is still the case today, but anyway, they put plastic over it. So I’m with Tim Ward, you know, we walk up and like, “What happened?’’ And, you know, “Oh, Paul got mad and threw the TV out the window.” [laughter] And then you go two houses down and since we ran the electric system, all of a sudden, you know, if you cut the power off, you see an extension cord running from one house to the other and they were running the house off an extension cord. Oak Ridge is in a location – gosh, I’m probably going to get killed by what I say here [laughter] – I ought to stop – but Oak Ridge is in a location where it was kind of the health center and may still be today. If you draw a swath up into the mountains northwest of here, this is where they went to the doctors and all that.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Yeah, Regional Medical Center.
Mr. Walker: Regional Medical. A lot of these folks had worked in coal mines I guess and had black lung disease and they couldn’t work. So a lot of them were the ones renting these houses. They moved in and they were not as attuned to calling the city to complain about things. So there was some cultural challenges we were having to deal with as well, but it was never a dull moment. When I got to Brentwood, I think we’ve had to condemn one house in twenty years. But that was the reality of leaving all those temporary houses up.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did you see many of the folks that had purchased those maybe originally or who were children of the homeowners who purchased them originally? Did you see many of them? You mentioned River’s Run and the subdivision you built your house in. Do you think many people moved out of those and transitioned into new housing and stayed here? Did you see in terms of the folks who lived in Oak Ridge much movement? At that time, Pellissippi was not developed, but today we also see a lot of folks living in Knoxville and in Farragut that commute into Oak Ridge. I suspect that wasn’t the case to that degree when you were here.
Mr. Walker: Well it was already in full motion.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Was it?
Mr. Walker: I think the challenge was the relative housing prices here, even with the improved cemesto – and the numbers, now, I may have them off – but if it was forty thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars for a house, do you buy a thirty year old house, at that time, you know, or do you buy a house that’s the same price or less that’s brand new and bigger in west Knoxville. That was the real challenge. People were coming in to work here and they didn’t have the history of Oak Ridge when it was a gated community and we had mud on the streets and we had won the war and all those great things. It was just a new generation came in. People move into Westwood. You had some people transferring in from out of town that were moving there, but you had other people who might have lived maybe in a cemesto, moved there or maybe in some of the newer houses that were built in the ’60s, moving up, that kind of thing. That momentum was already there when I got here.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did you see much in the way of population change one way or the other during the time you lived here?
Mr. Walker: Well the town was getting progressively older. When I say that, I don’t mean negative, either. It was just that people had moved in in the ’40s and they were all young or relatively young, and then they just stayed in their houses. The community aged. We were having to deal with, at that time, schools that had closed down and the buildings were there, and you know, what do you do with those buildings, and demolish them. The school system was overbuilt, having to go down, but every community I think eventually evolves through where you come in and age out sort of like that, but that really did affect Oak Ridge’s ability to get – it just didn’t have the normal circulation of new people in. Quite frankly, the geography here is just really challenging. The land’s flatter in Knox County than it is here. There are areas here that we would not even allow to be built on in Brentwood because of the steepness of the slopes, but here it’s normal, because, you know, it’s three narrow valleys that went down. They put the plants in each valley. Strategically they did not want, I guess, the Germans or whoever to be able to find this place and get in and that sort of worked against the community because you didn’t have thousands of acres that were just sitting there flat and for average, DOE never released land until starting in the ’80s, the late ’80s. By that time the momentum really was – had already –
Dr. Fitzgerald: Shifted?
Mr. Walker: Shifted there.
Dr. Fitzgerald: You mentioned the schools in terms of your role as Budget Director and later Assistant City Manager. Would it have been Bob Smallridge? Do you recall who was –
Mr. Walker: Bob Smallridge.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Did you in terms of your annual budget preparations have a fair amount of interaction with the schools?
Mr. Walker: Well there was some informal discussions, but having been in a city for the last twenty years where we don’t have a school system – it’s a county school system and is recognized as being a good school system, Williamson County – the schools cost a lot of money. There’s just no question about it, and under the Charter, the city could not change the line item that the schools gave us for the local request. We had to just put it in the budget. So you could have a budget that was balanced if they had only had a reasonable increase, but they increased it higher. Then all of a sudden we’re having to go in with a property tax increase. So the Manager and the Council were the ones taking the heat for the increases and it was very difficult politically to cut schools. If you did it on first reading at the public hearing for the next meeting, they’d have a hundred children in there and how they weren’t going to be able to have any paper and all that good stuff. It was all – I don’t want to say it was staged – but it’s kind of hard to tell the –
“You’re not going to do it for the children?” So, very difficult, and school, I mean, you know, when you’ve got a school system as small as Oak Ridge and I don’t know how many students they have now, but you don’t get a lot of economies of scale. And everybody here expected quality schools; that’s why they moved here. So I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t have a school system, but I remember going to Brentwood and they asked me, the first thing, “Can we get in the school business?’’ So I ran the numbers and I said, “Do you want property tax to be three times what it is right now?” “Oh no.” I said, “That’s exactly what it would take to get into the school business.” At the time, you still could get into it. Now you cannot, under the law, but it’s just very expensive if you run a city school system – so, tradeoffs.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Going back through and taking a look at some of the newspaper clippings that I found from your tenure here, one of the things that struck me was back in 1984 where the city government finance officers association awarded the City of Oak Ridge under your tenure, the first budget award, the first time in Tennessee. There was a quote in there subsequently where you’re talking about the budget weekend where you were quoted as saying, “‘I love budgeting. I can talk numbers and interpret what they mean,’ Walker said, smiling.” So what was that like in terms of for the first time in Tennessee having garnered that award under your tenure?
Mr. Walker: Well I forgot that we were the first city. When I went to Brentwood we received the award about a year or two after I got there, but everybody who’s in a job as a city manager has certain skill sets and my core one was finance and I just knew – I could understand the numbers. I still can do that today. I don’t prepare the budget, but –
Dr. Fitzgerald: You still smile?
Mr. Walker: I still smile. Where I am today we have Triple A bond rating from two rating agencies. We’re financially sound, even when times were good and we had lots of money coming in. We didn’t spend it all. We’re very conservative on how we spent our money. It’s not just what you collect. It’s how you carry it out. A lot of those things I learned here. Here we were struggling. The economy was tough back then and you didn’t have the same kind of growth. So we were having to watch every nickel we spent. So I sort of took that even when times were good in Brentwood. A lot of my younger staff had never been through a recession until the last two years and he just assumed everything just always went up and couldn’t understand why I was so conservative all the time and after last two years they think I’m a genius now. You know how it is. So there’s some benefit of being old I guess.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, and one of the other clippings that I found, which if you recall Knoxville News Sentinel reporter Frank Munger who still reports about Department of Energy issues in Oak Ridge. He did an article in September of 1985 where he named the twenty-five most impressive people in Oak Ridge and I noted in that article that Mike Walker was the only city employee that was named in that top twenty-five list. You talked a little bit about your relationship and the City’s relationship with the Department of Energy, but do you recall any particular folks within DOE who you interacted with in working on some of those city financial issues. Because obviously if you impressed Frank Munger that’s very impressive. [laughter]
Mr. Walker: Well, at the time, it was less on the financial issues and more on the environmental issues. Frank had a reputation of being a really astute reporter and he was. He was a good reporter, but I never had any issues with him, but the problem we had was, and I don’t know if you’ve been told this or not, but DOE – well let me back up. In the early ’80s, like ’81, ’82, when I was in Knoxville, the city built a new sewer plant which is out near Big Turtle Park, and they had to pump all the sewer that was on the east side of town, at gravity, to an old plant out there, back over, and it ran right through the city, the force main, went right through between this building here, the Municipal Center, and the Civic Center. At the time, after it was done, they needed to get the grass growing. Well, top soil had piled up around the bridges down on the East Fork Poplar Creek. So hey, we can do like a – I hate to use the term ��dredging’ now because that’s not socially acceptable anymore to the environmentalists – but we were taking the sediment that had piled up there and taken that and were spreading it on the sewer line all the way through the city. Well, it ended up, that was part of the contaminated material that came out of the creek. At the time, nobody at DOE – and they rode by there every day and had to know there was some issue with the creek, somebody did, and never said anything to the City Government about it – so all of a sudden when all this revelation came about the mercury contamination – and, I mean, it was really complex stuff, way beyond – I’m not a scientist, but I was the staff person dealing with the state environment health as well as DOE. We had to go in – and it was paid for by the feds – but they had to go in and take out basically a foot of dirt all the way through the areas where lots of people would be. We had TV cameras out here from Knoxville filming people in hazmat suits digging up the dirt through Bissell Park basically. So I was dealing a lot on that issue more than finance. So Frank was the reporter who was covering most of that. So I was the city rep; I was the city liaison. So if I knew something, I could answer his question, and I did. If I didn’t know it, I would tell him that. I think that may be why he said – because a lot of times, people don’t, especially in the federal government, don’t talk to folks. I dealt with people like – well I don’t know if they’re still around – Wayne Hibbetts and other folks that were involved, and quite frankly, the contamination problem was so unique that the only people that could figure it out were the people here at Oak Ridge, how to deal with it.
Dr. Fitzgerald: How did that information come to light then, when they had the soil piled up? How did the suspicion that there was something with the soil, how did that come about?
Mr. Walker: They literally had people come out – you know, once we knew what had happened – basically it was mercury spills that had come through the East Fork Poplar Creek. They started doing soil samples and we said “We want you to do them in this area.” Because nobody wanted to put –
Dr. Fitzgerald: DOE did the soil samples?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, one of their contractors did it. So that’s how we found out that we had high – elevated levels of mercury and, you know, it wasn’t that mercury was the direct problem – and I’m not a scientist – but it was sort of the trace for potentially other things that could be in the dirt, too, as well. But we had civilian folks – I mean, people had gardens along the creeks – testing their tomatoes. We had people’s urine being flown to the CDC to be tested to see if they had picked up anything. I learned a lot. The thing that was so good, we had a great Environmental Quality Advisory Board. Chuck Coutant was – I don’t know if Chuck’s still around – but Chuck was just – he was the chairman and there were four or five – well, there’s maybe ten on the board – but a lot of them had sort of ORNL background. They may not have been experts at all. They knew how to ask the questions. I didn’t know all this stuff. So what gives you confidence is they’re your neighbors. They’re living here and when we talk about this stuff, it’s a problem, but it wasn’t a public health issue. But the perception issue was just a killer. It was a killer. It hurt Oak Ridge for years.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well, being in Brentwood now for twenty years distance from your Oak Ridge tenure, what’s your perception today in terms of not living here anymore? Do you have any sense for whether that image has changed of Oak Ridge from outside East Tennessee?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, I think it has. You had that issue and then everybody had this image that everybody there is really smart and the Ph.D.s and all that stuff, so you’ve got – and a good school system. So you get sort of a mixed bag. When I applied for the job in Brentwood, you know, one of the issues and concerns I had was what was the school system like, because I had no – gosh, I was going to be going to a county school. It just so happened a planning commissioner who had been here had moved there a year or two before. I didn’t realize he was there, but he called me up and he said, “Good schools.” He said they may not have all the resources that Oak Ridge had, but they had enough parental involvement that it covered it. So everybody knows about the quality things in Oak Ridge, and lots of leaders in the state came from here.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well now that you’ve been back a few times, what are your observations? What are the biggest things you’ve seen, the changes since you’ve worked and lived here, other than the Pellissippi Parkway?
Mr. Walker: Well I actually have not been on Pellissippi. I normally come up 58 and 95. I’ll probably go out Pellissippi on the way out today to North Carolina. The Downtown area’s substantially built out. What I call Downtown, where we are right here. A lot more traffic, but it’s that way everywhere I guess. It’s all relative. It’s still a beautiful town. It’s a clean town. Great place to raise kids. I didn’t sense anything different on that.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well you have mentioned a few of the lessons that you learned maybe in Oak Ridge that you have applied to your tenure as Brentwood City Manager. Are there other examples that you can think of? Obviously you had quite an experience here basically in what you just described, which sounds like it was good experience for learning how to deal with the media and dealing with a somewhat crisis situation, but as you take a look at the experience that you drew here, do you have any other observations?
Mr. Walker: Well, it was a town that did not make decisions quickly. The process part was as important as the outcome. So one of the shocks was when I went to Brentwood, it was more of a business oriented town, professional oriented. If they had ninety-five percent of the facts on an issue, they were willing to take a calculated risk to move ahead because they didn’t want to lose the opportunity. So that was shocking to me that you didn’t have to get to 99.9 percent of the information before you made a decision. But I still – from an analytical standpoint, there’s not a thing I do there that I don’t think about, “Well, what questions potentially could be asked about the subject?” I mean, I anticipate everything. [laughter]
Dr. Fitzgerald: Thoroughly analyzing all the –
Mr. Walker: I analyze it to death, you know, in my mind, because there will be questions that come up and you just want to be ready. That’s not to say we don’t have scientists there, but that’s just the difference of the culture, I think. There’s a lot more entrepreneurs there, a lot more diversity of the business community.
Dr. Fitzgerald: One of the things that I’ve seen as kind of a trend since my tenure here is looking at the modernization of Y-12 and the phenomenal modernization of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. One of the things they have continued to build upon is looking at the business – the incubator – the Tech 2020 relationship with the Chamber of Commerce – but in looking at how to grow businesses from the technology that comes out of the lab and Y-12, was that ever much of an emphasis while you were here?
Mr. Walker: Not to the degree it probably is today. I’m glad to hear that because we did have a building over on Midway Lane that we would – and then the other industrial park – I can’t remember now – where we would actually –
Dr. Fitzgerald: Commerce Park?
Mr. Walker: Yeah, provide low rent space to entrepreneurs who had ideas that came out of something that they were doing at the Lab. The Lab I think at that time had a lot of, you know, if you figure out something, it’s our – we own it. We own the rights to your patent or whatever you call it. So there was not that kind of environment. I had a close friend who lived here and ended up – he was at the Lab probably eight or ten years and ended up going to UNC Chapel Hill, professor, because he was able to do more things and reap some reward out of it.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Was that David?
Mr. Walker: Gary Glish.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Yes, okay.
Mr. Walker: You know Gary?
Dr. Fitzgerald: Okay, well, it made me think of David Ammons –
Mr. Walker: Yeah, David Ammons is there too, obviously.
Dr. Fitzgerald: – in terms of over there. But as a public administrator, if you were teaching a class about Oak Ridge, are there any other things that you would say to students that you think are significant in terms of public management?
Mr. Walker: Well, everybody here is thorough, they’re honest. Maybe I will say something out of line, but integrity is really important here and doing the right thing; people try to help people. They started out with a model that was created by the Federal Government on how the city should be. Literally there was a book. It’s probably still around. Every department has this number of employees doing this. It was a consultant the feds had in. So, you know, there was a lot more – I hate to use the word ‘bureaucratic’ – but it was a lot more structured.
Dr. Fitzgerald: The original planned development.
Mr. Walker: Yeah, exactly. But Oak Ridge is recognized as a well-run city in the state. It’s always had a good reputation on that end. You got a dedicated staff. We got people here and they were here twenty years before I was here or fifteen years before I was here and they’re still here today. A lot of loyalty.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Is there anything else that you’d like to add that you don’t think we’ve touched on?
Mr. Walker: Well I just appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak today. I think this is a good program. I just saw a piece of everything. There are other people who saw as much or more than I did, but it’s a very unique town. There are very few like it. Very few towns have one, at that time, one main industry and they were non-taxable. Think about all the things that were so unique about this place, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak, too.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Well obviously you played a significant role, as I mentioned at the beginning of the interview. We want to thank you so much for taking your time out to be part of our project and we look forward to a long tenure in the future.
Mr. Walker: Thank you.
Dr. Fitzgerald: Thank you, Mike.
[end of recording]